Dmitry Matvienko

“Time passes, fades, and vanishes, only I remain still and blocked,” Schubert wrote on April 27, 1816, to his brother Franz Ferdinand. That same day, the nineteen-year-old completed his Fourth Symphony. He chose the key of C minor, as Beethoven had for his Fifth, and gave it the rather exuberant subtitle “Tragic.” “The characteristics of a tragic symphony would be of quite a different kind,” Robert Schumann would later remark in surprise. Faced with the legacy of “heroes,” was the young composer perhaps searching for a language of his own? One thing is certain, he was anything but “blocked.” The first public performance took place in 1849 in Leipzig. The journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik emphasized that the fourth movement was undoubtedly the “most significant […], in which the composer also most clearly emancipates himself from the influence of Haydn and Mozart.” An achievement to be celebrated? In 1945, Shostakovich was invited to mark the end of the war with a grand patriotic work. Instead, he presented a brief symphony for small orchestra that felt more like a mischievous prank, with ironic passages, a circus march in place of a heroic finale, and coded references such as the song “Praise of Lofty Intellect” from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, in which a donkey, that is, Stalin, claims that the cuckoo sings better than the nightingale.